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Welcome to the English Major! In this course, the first
required course for all English majors and minors, we will cover the
fundamentals of how to study literature.
The course will be focused around studying the major genres—fiction,
poetry, and drama—and the various components of studying texts (theme,
characterization, symbolism, point of view, etc.) We will learn appropriate vocabulary and MLA requirements for
research papers, but just as importantly, we will learn how to approach literature in critically astute way, developing habits of mind as befits English majors.

Thus, we'll also practice the basics of doing literary analysis
and research and hone the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills you
will need to be a successful English major. Ideally, the close attention we pay
to language in the class will sharpen your skills in reading and writing,
deepen your appreciation for literature, and expand the ways you view the
hidden worlds in each of the texts we read.

The
readings
for
this course comprise a representative selection of works that reflect the various
traditions in American letters from the end of the Civil War to the end of
World War II. Taken together, they chronicle the maturation and development of a
national literature through which the myths and ideologies of the United States are expressed,
challenged, and revised. We will explore a chronological succession of cultural and
literary movements, such as Romanticism, Realism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Modernism.
Along the way we will consider the ways in which all the writers we examine construct definitions of what it means to be
an American and what it means to inhabit American land space. Some of the writers we will examine include: Henry James, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Langston Hughes,Wallace Stevens, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene O'Neill, among many others. There will be periodic quizzes as well as midterm and final exams. You can expect to write two papers: a short quote-driven response and a longer research paper.

You know what? Descriptions of technical writing classes can be sound really boring: you'll write memos, business letters, a status report, and a resume; you learn how to write formal, research-based documents; how to work collaboratively to finish a project; how to design documents using technical writing conventions and paying attention to audience and purpose. Nothing too exciting, right?

But the truth is, you'll learn more about the intricacies of being a good writer than you could have imagined. Technical writing is all about conciseness, precision, clarity, and meeting the needs of an audience. Thus, regardless of your major, if you want practice in these skills, this is the writing class for you.

Another plus: because this course is required for the Technical/Professional Communications Minor, it fills up fast with students from many different majors. You'll learn a lot from interacting with other students who have such a variety of interests, career goals, and writing backgrounds.

Ever since Adam
and Eve’s disobedience led to their expulsion from the Garden of Eden,
literature has featured characters that do not conform to social norms. While
some of these characters challenge conventional mores for personal or political
reasons, others are simply unable or unwilling to fit into their culture. Focusing
on the theme of misfits and rebels, this course will present fiction and drama
from a range of cultures and time periods, ranging from nineteenth-century
Russia to Tiananmen-square era China. Required activities include an analytical
essay, mid-term exam, final exam, oral presentation, and daily work. Texts may
be Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy
of the People, Kenzaburo Oe’s Nip the
Buds, Shoot the Kids, Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at PointZero, and
Hong Ying’s Summer of Betrayal.

This course offers Secondary
English certification students their foundation in English/Language Arts
education. As the first of three
pedagogy courses, Introduction to ELA Education provides students with
necessary background on the teaching profession and the fundamentals of
educational and adolescent psychology and then moves to a more specific focus on
the secondary ELA classroom. Students
will be introduced to the philosophical beliefs and practical realities of
American education (with a special focus on middle and high schools), the array
of learning and development theories that inform effective educators, and the
range of effective literacy practices involved in ELA teaching and learning at
the secondary level. Curriculum, student
diversity, assessment, technology, differentiation, and classroom management
are some of the topics that will be explored both generally and then with an
ELA focus as students work toward becoming reflective collaborative
decision-makers. Readings, assignments,
and practical demonstrations will provide students with an opportunity to
engage with theory and research that will be relevant to their future
coursework and eventual middle and high school ELA classrooms. Our primary concern will be the joining of
theory about teaching and learning
with the practical methods of implementing
such theory in a secondary classroom.
This course is a prerequisite for ENG-426: Teaching Adolescent
Literature and EDU-422: Teaching English in the Secondary Schools.

English 308: Fiction WritingN. Connelly | MWF 12:00 - 12:50

During the first half of the semester, students will be introduced to key concepts of narrative through lectures, readings, and sometimes unusual exercises. All of this will lead toward the creation of an original literary short story. The second half of the semester is dedicated to workshopping these pieces, with each student having a day dedicated to his/her fiction. No prerequisite save the desire to write compelling stories.

English 330: Shakespeare Dr. D. Montuori| TR 2:00-3:15

English 333: Cultural StudiesDr Michael Bibby| TR 2:00-3:15

In the Flesh: Cultural Studies and Human Bodies This course will introduce students to the field of Cultural
Studies, surveying its major theories and methods, and examining its recent
developments. Since its beginnings in 1970s England and Europe, Cultural
Studies has drawn on various forms of Marxist, psychoanalytic, semiotics,
post-structuralist, and sociological theories to interpret culture as it exists
in everyday, lived experience. Cultural Studies combines the tools of
traditional literary interpretation, historical research, sociological methods,
and ethnographic observation to examine such phenomena as punk music, TV,
romance novels, fashion, body modifications, and dance clubs--to name some of
its most famous subjects--in order to reveal how these practices are meaningful
to people, how they are discursively structured, or how they produce forms of
identity.

One prolific area of Cultural Studies research has focused
on human bodies--for example, cultural practices of embodiment, cultural
politics of bodies, the meaning of corporeality in contemporary cultures. While
this course will serve as a general introduction to the field of Cultural
Studies, it also seeks to examine how the theories and methods of Cultural
Studies may be brought to bear on interpretations of human embodiment. Students
will examine embodiment in various media, such as literary texts, films, TV,
fashion, the internet, scientific literature, political campaigns, etc. Some
questions the course may pursue include: How do cultural constructions of
gendered, sexed, classed, and raced bodies organize political discourses? How
do fantasies of cyborg or posthuman bodies express certain cultural values in a
digitized social? What do cultural panics about fitness, health, and diet
reveal? Course work will include online exams,
summary abstracts, class presentations, and a research paper.

English 366: History and Structure of English LanguageDr. William Harris| TR 5:00-6:15

English 378: Studies in Early American Literature Dr. William Harris | TR 2:00-3:15

English 380: Studies in 19th Century British Literature

Dr: Catherine Dibello - TR 9:30-10:45

Nineteenth-century
Britain witnessed an extraordinary increase in the number of women writers.
While some of these women achieved great commercial success, many also faced
hostile critics who either dismissed their work as trivial or objected to their
treatment of taboo topics and creation of unconventional heroines. In this
section of ENG 380, we will analyze four novels by women and read secondary
sources in which nineteenth-century and more recent critics respond to these
books. This student-centered course emphasizes discussion and includes a paper,
an annotated bibliography, a final exam, and an oral report. Texts include the
Norton critical editions of Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane
Eyre, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

English 381: Studies in 19th Century American Literature

Dr. Erica Galioto |TR 9:30 - 10:45

Duplicates, Dupes, and Deceptions: Unacknowledged Doubleness in the 19th
Century will examine the concepts of identity,
identification, and knowledge through their related presentation in
nineteenth-century American fiction. Our
central focus will be to analyze works of fiction through the lens of the
following questions: How is identity
formed? How do we communicate that
identity to others? To what extent can
we identify with another’s experience?
Is reading an experience of easy identification? Is it ever possible to know the self or an
other (whether actual or fictional) completely?
How do we come to know anything at all?
We will begin by studying double internal identity in Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables
(1851) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Next, we will analyze the external
performance of identity in Mark Twain’s Puddn’head
Wilson (1894) and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1856). Finally, we will complicate the
effectiveness of sentimentalism in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (18?).
We will move from one canonical text to the other based on how each
internally displays manifestations of flawed identification and externally
disrupts the reader’s own sense of seamless identification. Students in this course will also be exposed
to criticism and psychoanalytic theory related to the fiction and the concept
of identification. Three papers and one
presentation are required, as well as periodic written responses and active
discussion.

Writing: This
course is called Studies in Writing because it is meant to give you lots of
practice drafting, revising, and writing.
Moreover, I plan to give you the opportunity to write in a variety of
different genres: memoir, profile, research, and oral history. By the end of the semester, you will have
written a publishable essay, approved by your oral history partner.

Service-Learning: This course is designed with a
service-learning focus. In other words,
your learning experiences will be tied in some way with a practical, hands-on
experience. This project will also help
you become more clearly connected to the surrounding community and develop a
stronger sense of your own citizenship.
The most recent educational scholarship tells us that students have a
fuller, richer academic experience with they are able to pair what they learn
in the classroom with the projects they complete out in the surrounding
neighborhoods. While the major focus of
this class will be your own project, I invite the pre-service middle school
teachers in the class to research how they might create service-learning
projects for their future classes.

Oral History: The particular focus of this course
will be oral histories. We will read and discuss a variety of oral histories as
well as the scholarship that informs the practice. Certainly, oral histories provide the
practical, lived history that can augment recorded history in important
ways. More specifically, oral histories can
provide a way for “ordinary” people to contribute to history. Oral histories often reveal aspects of the
past that did not make it into standard history narratives. We learn more about minorities, women, and
the working-class through the stories they tell. In this class, you will interview a Shippensburg University graduate about his/her experience living on campus from 1960-1970, and ask them to talk
about what their experience meant to them.
It is my hope that this project will give a great deal of practical and
useful hand-on experience. You will have
practice interviewing someone new, recording their words, transforming his/her
words into a compelling essay, and publishing that essay in a book.

Required Texts:

Terkel, Studs. Hard Times, New York: New Press. 2000

Robert
Perks and Alistair Thomson. The Oral
History Reader, second edition.
New York: Routledge. 2006.

“Methods” aims to prepare you for the experience of
student teaching, and beyond that for the work of being an early career
teacher. Our course will center on several essential questions:

* What does it mean to teach English in a contemporary
American secondary school setting? What are the conceptual, practical, and
personal dimensions of the job? How does one do it well?

* What roles does an effective teacher need to play to
make the classroom, the school, and the community in which s/he teaches places
where young people can learn what reading and writing have to teach them?

* What happens in classrooms and schools—educationally,
socially, culturally? What can we learn from observing, investigating what we
see and hear, and reading about issues in contemporary education?

* How do young people develop as readers and writers?
What can teachers do to lead their students beyond the required skills they
need to achieve to open their minds to the potential power of reading and
writing in their lives?

Activities and projects we will engage in during the
course include the following:

* Extended field observations and collaborations on
teaching in varied school settings

* Research into a teaching approach that seems likely to
be useful in your student teaching placement

* Planning of a unit or set of extended learning
sequences for your student teaching experience

* Regular collaboration with classroom peers in planning,
leading classroom experiences, and analyzing problems of English teaching
practice

* In-depth reading and thinking about English teaching
generally, writing development and teaching, and the interaction between
standards, reading, and literature

Open only to those who have successfully completed English 308, this course opens with a series of directed writing prompts but moves swiftly to workshop, when each student contributes his/her own fiction for the class's consideration. The class concludes with a week long discussion of publishing.

English 467: Seminar in DramaDr. Thomas Crochunis | MW 6:30-7:45

In this course, we will explore how contemporary
playwrights in Britain and America have worked with gender and sexuality in
their writing for the stage. Throughout the course, we will read cultural
analysis, criticism, and theory that look at the relationship of both gender
and sexuality to performance. In our study of the plays, we will consider how
playwrights’ reworking of gender interacts with both dramatic form (character,
plot, setting, language) and theatrical design (role-character dynamics,
environment, rhetorical relationship with the audience).

[Important Note: Those experienced in literature studies need have no fear if they have limited experience with drama. This course will be both advanced in its approach to the content of the texts studied and supportive in helping students learn how to think about plays creatively and critically.]

The heart of the course will focus on British and
American plays written from the 1970s until the present whose formal
innovations and political/emotional challenges to their audiences’ views enact
a transformation of gender and sexual relations on stage. We will read plays
from among the following: Caryl Churchill—Cloud Nine; Sam Shepard—True West; David
Mamet—Sexual Perversity in Chicago; Harold Pinter—Betrayal; Samuel Becket—Not I;
David Henry Hwang—M. Butterfly; Charles Ludlum—The Mystery of Irma Vep; Paula
Vogel—How I Learned to Drive; Tony Kushner—Angels in America; Teresa
Rebeck—Sunday on the Rocks; Adrienne Kennedy—The Ohio State Murders; Brenda
Withers and Mindy Kaling—Matt and Ben; Suzan-Lori Parks—Topdog/Underdog or
Venus; Neil Labute—Fat Pig; Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theatre
Company—The Laramie Project; Fiona Evans—Scarborough; Sarah Kane—Crave; Tarell
Alvin McCraney—American Trade; Thomas Bradshaw—Intimacy; or perhaps selected
others

A
significant feature of the course will be in-class performance experimentation
with gendered roles and with theatrical scenes and situations. Playing through
performance will be a major part of our work. We
will
collaborate to host an evening of presentations dealing with gender and
sexuality issues, you will write regular short response papers, and you will complete a substantial
performance, scholarly, reviewing, media, creative writing (playwriting), or
otherwise creative project related to course themes. Additionally, pending fall performance schedules
in the region, we may go to the theatre to see plays of interest.

English 468: Seminar in Fiction: The Rise of the Novel and Literary Relatives

Dr. Sharon Harrow| MW 3:30-4:45

This
course will trace the origins and development of the novel from its primordial
to postmodern forms. The novel is said
to have been born in the 18th century. Throughout that period, the form of the novel
changed considerably. We will read some
important novels against the culture that produced them, considering as well
the ways in which novels produced culture.
The novel was a genre concerned with interiority and subjectivity, and
we will ask a number of questions about that: how was identity performed,
represented, politicized? Novels,
themselves, asked – and still ask - a number of questions, such as: how do
people respond to desire? why do people commit crimes? how do labor and class
affect our identities? what’s the relationship between self and family, self
and society? How were ideologies of
gender related to a number of dichotomies that structured Enlightenment
thinking, such as reason vs. passion or public vs. private?

In
considering how the novel developed as a genre, we will read texts that pair
well together as literary relatives.
Some of the pairings involve a contemporary novel that rewrites an
earlier novel. Some of the pairings
involve a contemporary novel that rewrites or reimagines an earlier poem. Pairings might include: